Geoscientist Online

Sir, It was good to see an editorial and 'Soapbox' article in the November 2017 edition of Geoscientist that raise the profile of carbon capture and [geological] storage/disposal (CCS). 

Bryan Lovell’s Soapbox concludes: “We geologists have been set the challenge of finding adequate safe storage for carbon dioxide … We have seldom had a more important job to do.”  I would go further, and posit that the technical feasibility of achieving geological storage/disposal of CO₂ at the required scale and speed is the pre-eminent practical challenge for the geosciences in the next two or three decades.  

To be effective in relation to the Paris Agreement goals, CCS needs to be operating by mid-century at a scale comparable with the current global fossil fuel industry and dealing not only with CO₂ from power plants and other familiar industrial “point sources” such as cement and steel works, but also from bio-energy production and probably from methane to hydrogen conversion and direct air capture of CO₂. 

But is CCS on such a scale geologically feasible?  I am a generalist applied geoscientist, lacking the time or resources to read into the literature, but from a few conversations with knowledgeable senior geoscientists in recent years I have encountered a bewildering range of opinions from unqualified confidence to dismissive scepticism, rather similar to the range of views on anthropogenic global warming that was available in the geoscience community until about a decade or so ago.

It also seems to me that the longer that geological storage/disposal of CO₂ (in whatever form) is portrayed primarily as the potential saviour of the fossil fuel industries, including coal (as was the case in both the November Geoscientist pieces), the greater will be the resistance to CCS among those expressing the greatest concerns about climate change.

I was one of those who called for the Society to issue a statement on the geological evidence concerning the sensitivity of the global climate system to carbon emissions (published in 2010, as mentioned in Bryan Lovell’s article).  I now think the time has come for the Society to educate its Fellows on the geological prospects for CCS, both globally (the scale that matters) and for the UK.  A concise survey of the current scene would enable Fellows to have informed discussions of CCS in their professional and social networks, and help counter false narratives (whatever and wherever they may be).

From Hugh Richards